Torey is the inaugural Prairie Artist in Residence (2024) at Franconia Sculpture Park in Shafer, Minnesota.
Torey’s project, Andscape: Entangled Pluriverse is a rather nebulous work in progress, getting to know and forming a relationship to the land.
To know a landscape is to form an intimate relationship to it. She approaches the site with a series of questions when meeting this place, while also leaving room for being present with it and its ‘placeness’.
We are the land and the land is in us. Throughout the history of colonization and Western patriarchy in the
US, we have been disentangled from the relationship mindset and connection to the land. We (settlers) see the
landscape as something to extract from - to bulldoze over - as a site of boundless resources for western minded
human centeredness.
What happens when we get to know a place? We may be able to make better assumptions about what happens
there. What lives here, where does the water flow, how are the contours forming,
what is overbearing, what is needed, what are the impacts of humanism, and how can we best shift the lens from
human center- to a multi-species choreography for non-human life? What does a landscape of entanglement
look like?
We have entered the Anthropocene (also a human-centered term) - a new geological era in which humanity
influences every square meter of the earth’s surface and atmosphere. We have described ourselves as humans as
culture, a dichotomy and separation from ‘nature’. In thinking about our separation and extraction from nature,
we know that this dualistic approach of nature vs. culture must develop and adopt new approaches to the way
that we think about materials, design, art, urbanism, and endless growth (capitalism).
Torey’s approach to landscape is to understand the inter-subjective relationships with non-humans, the living
selves and communicative relations that they have with one another, or as Bruno Latour de-
scribes, an ‘entangled pluriverse’.
As Donna Haraway proposes, entangling ourselves involves entangling time - ‘chipping and shredding and lay-
ering like a mad gardener, (to) make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures’.
Understanding that the land is both in and outside of us - and that we are not the main characters but a theatrical
choreography, entangled with non humans and time.
This relationship development is supported by a series of conversations and workshops programmed
around art and ecology including artists who are working ‘with’ ideas of entanglements and materiality.
Her (human) collaborators include Zeni Flauta, Kim Boustad, Jessie Merriam, More Light (Al Church, Don House, Lars Larson, Eamonn McLain,Dave Simonett, Sarah Elstran), Micheal Legan, Sebastian Duncan-Portoundo, and Megan Burchette.
This project is made possible by Franconia Sculpture Park’s amazing staff.